Americana

The cold and miserable trudge to Trump’s inevitable Iowa win

THE SCENE

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – When Nikki Haley walked into an arts district event space here, with a pared-down version of her stump speech, half a dozen chairs were empty. When Ron DeSantis rallied with two of his best-known Iowa endorsers in the Des Moines suburbs, two dozen out-of-state college students had grabbed the best seats.

And on Thursday, while a “once-in-a-decade” storm pummeled the state, Donald Trump was in New York, on trial, accusing the Biden administration of “cheating” to slow him down.

After a year of campaigning, canvassing, and pricey advertising, Iowa’s caucuses are coming to an unsuspenseful end. Public polls show DeSantis and Haley deadlocked for second place as she looks toward New Hampshire, where the race is actually competitive. Snow and freezing temperatures have shrunk crowds and lowered expectations for the Monday vote, when wind chill in some areas will reach the negative 20s.

“It’s not the most pleasant, but I don’t think you’ll ever be able to cast a vote that has more impact,” DeSantis told members of the Northside Conservative Club on Monday — keeping part of his public schedule, alongside Gov. Kim Reynolds, while Haley scrapped a trip to vote-rich northwest Iowa. (She replaced them with tele-town halls, while DeSantis canceled late afternoon events north of Des Moines.)

“We don’t know what the turnout’s going to be,” DeSantis explained. “It could be much smaller than what it’s been, in, you know, the ‘16 cycle. That’s possible.”

DAVID’S VIEW

DeSantis and Haley spent Wednesday night in combat, emptying their oppo files, both portraying the other as a liar who couldn’t win the nomination. But they are closing in very different ways: Haley as the candidate who’s only showing up in Iowa on the way to the real race in New Hampshire, DeSantis as the conservative trying to keep Iowa relevant by showing up everywhere.

Haley has kept a lighter schedule, speaking for 20 minutes in major population centers, taking no questions, and posing for selfies with potential caucus-goers. She doesn’t talk about winning the state; she talks about cutting spending, defending Ukraine, and how the country will be watching on Monday night for Iowa voters’ advice.

“I’m from South Carolina,” Haley said in Cedar Rapids. “We’re an early state, too, and we love the fact that candidates come in. But boy, we love it when they leave.”

DeSantis has continued to hold town halls, spending an hour at each stop answering questions. A candidate who once boasted about his ability to run around the “legacy media” now does “Morning Joe” hits and ask-anything press gaggles — even knocking Haley’s campaign for, this week, telling reporters to step back and stop talking with voters 15 minutes before she arrived at her events.

“If you put your foot in your mouth every other day, if you’re scared to take questions from the media and voters and all these other things, you are not going to be able to handle what’s coming for you in a general election,” DeSantis told voters on Thursday night in Clive, just outside Des Moines.

Do voters, especially Republican voters, care how much their candidates field questions? In my interviews, it didn’t sound that way. Some of the DeSantis and Haley voters I talked to — and all of the Trump voters — said that they’d skipped Wednesday night’s CNN debate. DeSantis, whose political skill set does not include a poker face, didn’t feign enthusiasm when an undergrad from Ohio asked how he could heal the political divide, or when a man visiting Ankeny from California asked whether implementing his policies at the federal level would really be the same as implementing them in Florida.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s campaigned at least twice in all 99 Iowa counties, was keeping an even busier schedule than DeSantis. He wasn’t looking ahead to New Hampshire. In his closing stops, he’s looked further down the calendar, conjuring a scenario where DeSantis and Haley, who cannot beat Trump, team up and replace Trump as the nominee.

“They want to narrow this down to a two horse race between Donald Trump and a puppet who they can control,” he explained in Cedar Rapids on Thursday. “They will then eliminate Trump and trot in their puppet.” He would stay in the race, he explained, not because he was about to win Iowa, but because the MAGA movement needed an insurance policy in case of any pre-convention skullduggery.

“If you want to save Trump, a vote for me is actually the way to do that,” Ramaswamy said. It was, he admitted, “counterintuitive.”

THE VIEW FROM VOTERS

Ramaswamy’s theory didn’t sound odd to his audience. Some had watched Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar drop out of the 2020 Democratic primary just in time to help Joe Biden surge. As the candidate walked to his bus, one voter showed me a text message she’d gotten from a friend — a clip from conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s podcast, speculating that DeSantis and Haley would collude to stop Trump.

“It’s all a scam,” said Troy Johnstone, who said he was worried about Trump being forced off the ballot. “Hitler did the same thing — attack and arrest your political opponents. That’s what Biden’s doing. And they call Trump a dictator?”

Trump’s voters said they saw no real challenge from Haley or DeSantis. They knew he’d win Iowa. They were more concerned with what his opponents would do, after the caucuses, to deny him the nomination.

“They’ve tried to stop him, and stop him, and stop him, and that man has not given up,” said Wanda Beltramea, a Trump supporter from Cedar Rapids. She’d largely ignored the rest of the GOP field, and was aghast when one canvasser showed up at her home suggesting that Trump might be struck from the ballot — which she couldn’t imagine. “It’s in God’s hands. God has the final say.”

Iowans voting for Haley and DeSantis were split on the question. Some believed that Trump’s behavior had disqualified from the job. But another, popular view, was that he was too damaged, and whatever they personally thought of him, they needed a back-up plan.

“I just don’t think he’ll be able to get anything done, because of all this garbage that’s going on,” said Alice Schenkelberg, as she waited to hear Haley speak in Cedar Rapids. “I mean, the guy won’t have any time to be president.”

NOTABLE

• Elsewhere in Semafor, Shelby Talcott and I talk to a range of Iowa voters about their options, from MAGA voters who never quit Trump to never-Trumpers gravitating toward Haley.
• In Politico, Jonathan Martin surveys Nikki Haley’s crowds to identify her problem in Iowa: “I struggled to find a single attendee in the suburban strip mall tavern who was not a college graduate.”
• In the Des Moines Register, Brianne Pfannenstiel looks at the whole state to explain where votes will come from, and where Trump’s opponents need to run up the score to stay relevant.

Vivek 2024, “Turn the TV Off.” Iowa’s airwaves have been clotted for months with ads for Trump, Haley, and DeSantis. Ramaswamy stayed off, saying that he’d read the data and found most TV spending was wasteful. But he broke his boycott for this, a spot that ran during CNN’s debate on Tuesday, in which he grabs a remote and urges viewers to turn it off. “They don’t want you to hear from me about the truth of what really happened on January 6,” he says; he missed the debate’s polling threshold, but has accused the network of de-listing a YouTube video of his live town hall.

SFA Fund, “Daddy.” The pro-Haley super PAC is getting in one more shot at DeSantis, mocking him as a Trump sycophant with clips from his best-known 2018 ad. The footage helped win him that election — DeSantis reading Trump slogans to his first two children. It plays differently next to an arena crowd chanting “who’s your daddy?” and the closing message that “America Needs Strength, Not a Suck-Up.” Haley’s performing best with the minority of independents and Republicans who don’t want Trump back, and this is for them.

Katie Porter for Senate, “Shake Up the Senate.” Absentee voting in California’s March 5 primary starts in weeks, and the two Democrats who’ve raised the most money in the U.S. Senate race — Porter and Rep. Adam Schiff — have started to go on the air. Porter’s spot spends a lot of time appealing to non-Democrats, reminding them that she opposes earmarks and stock trades by members of Congress, and that she’s taken on “even administration officials” in hearings. Democrats will make up the biggest share of voters in the primary, but Porter’s trying to convince independents and Republicans to get her to the general election. If it’s Schiff versus any Republican, Schiff is the prohibitive favorite; if it’s Schiff and Porter, she’s already reaching out to voters who might not want to promote Donald Trump’s inquisitor.

Suffolk’s first Iowa poll before the caucuses is the only one to find Haley significantly ahead of DeSantis in the chase for second place. Haley’s less well-liked than DeSantis with the potential caucus electorate — 58% of Republicans view him favorably, and just 49% view her favorably. But Trump is crushing DeSantis with the conservatives who make up most of the sample. One in four Republicans say the Florida governor would be their second choice, and one in five say Ramaswamy is. They are just too firm in their first choices for that to matter.

This may be the final public poll to include Christie as an option; his exit, despite his hot mic ruminations about the race and Haley’s political skill, frees up moderate voters who are among the least likely to support Trump. Christie’s support always had a spiked ceiling; here, more than two-thirds of primary voters said they viewed him unfavorably. Among undeclared voters, who can cross over into the GOP primary, Haley’s simply better-liked than Trump — he’s 13 points underwater with those voters, and she’s got a net favorable rating of 22 points. The more non-Republicans show up for this primary, the better she does.

When Ron DeSantis started his climb through Florida politics, Matt Dixon was there. When DeSantis won his second term by a landslide, Dixon was covering it — sometimes from a distance, as the Florida governor went around the “legacy media” to build support with conservatives. Now a correspondent for NBC News, Dixon just published “Swamp Monsters,” a study of the governor’s rise and his relationship with Donald Trump. Before heading to Iowa this week, Dixon talked with Americana about what he found, and this is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Americana: There’s a popular idea that DeSantis started out 2023 in pole position, and he lost it because he waited too long to get in. How true is that?

Matt Dixon: I agree with it, to some extent. He won by 20 points in November 2022. He launched six months later, and his numbers were already going down. His team was going to launch an exploratory committee in that period, but they didn’t. So they were launching in a position of weakness.

Americana: DeSantis talks a lot about crushing the Democratic Party in 2022 — which he did. It’s been harder to repeat that success in Iowa. How much credit do you give him for the Florida GOP’s dominance?

Matt Dixon: He expedited it, without question. He personally raised around $5 million for party building. There’d always been a voter registration gap between Democrats and Republicans, and it peaked during the second Obama campaign. Republicans started eroding that, and it was getting narrower pre-DeSantis. After DeSantis raised the money, they washed over the gap like a tidal wave.

But Florida Democrats have an allergy to picking the right candidate, and the resources weren’t there in 2022. Their national committees gave up on FL. In 2018, they spent $60 million for Andrew Gillum. In 2022 they spent $2 million for Charlie Crist.

Americana: Did he over-read what the 2022 results meant for him?

Matt Dixon: Florida has 10 expensive media markets. Rick Scott showed that you can run for governor of Florida and win on TV, while you don’t put yourself out there personally. I think that the DeSantis team failed to recognize how the transition would be, when he’d have to do one-on-one stuff on camera, constantly. If you can raise enough money in Florida, the idea of generating awkward moments with voters doesn’t come up. He and [his wife] Casey really are a team of two, and there was an expectation that this brain trust would expand for a presidential campaign, but it didn’t happen.

Americana: After the midterms, Christina Pushaw laid out the ways she and DeSantis had gone around the “legacy media,” and there was some hope, from some conservatives, that he could scale that up as a presidential candidate. What happened?

Matt Dixon: They really thought that was how it was going to work. They got a sugar high from beating an inept Democratic party with a nominee, Crist, that even Dems didn’t like. Ultimately, the Pushaw strategy failed. The troll tornadoes that reporters used to experience regularly on Twitter have gone away. Now he does Morning Joe every week. The theory didn’t work and they moved on.

Americana: In the book, you write that Trump respected Rick Scott as a peer, and never respected DeSantis. Why was that?

Matt Dixon: Scott was a billionaire when he took office. DeSantis didn’t own a car or a home. Trump and Scott knew each other a bit before Trump ran, and he sees Scott as an equal because he made a bunch of money in business before he ran for everything. DeSantis was making low six figures as a congressman when Trump endorsed him. So, he viewed the governor as a plaything who was supposed to be loyal to him.

Americana: When he went negative on Trump, DeSantis focused a lot on Fauci and the pandemic response. The Trump team hit back by pointing to how DeSantis did follow CDC guidance in 2020, at first, and how he ran a vaccination program before he turned against it. What’s his real thinking on all of this, and what’s just convenient to campaign on?

Matt Dixon: His initial instinct when the pandemic hit was to push vaccines as hard as possible. He stood there live on TV when WWII vets were getting vaccinated. I mean — look for that clip now, it seems like it was beamed in from another world. He set up vaccine sites. Where he is personally, I don’t know. But that was his initial instinct. When the GOP base turned, that’s when vaccine critics, like [Surgeon General] Joseph Ladapo, were elevated by DeSantis.

When Ladapo put out a letter attacking the COVID vaccines last week, DeSantis immediately started talking about it in Iowa. The blatant nature of that is hard to miss.

Americana: If he loses this race, what’s waiting for him in Florida?

Matt Dixon: My gut sense is that he’ll come back to Tallahassee and try to reassert his dominance. Obviously he’d be wounded, compared to last year. He hasn’t really talked about a state-level policy agenda. I don’t know what his next culture war stuff will be, but when he conquers those mountains he’ll build new ones.

I do think he views himself as a 2028 candidate, that that’s what next. But he hasn’t expanded his national donor footprint at all. That’s part of why Never Back Down had to play such a big role. When that didn’t work and his team launched Fight Right, they were going back to the same Florida donors who’d given to his other campaigns and PACs. He’s lost the Ken Griffins of the world, the guys who were interested in him at the end of 2022. I don’t see how he gets them back.

• three days until the Iowa Republican caucuses
• 11 days until the New Hampshire primary
• 22 days until the South Carolina Democratic primary
• 32 days until the special election to replace George Santos
• 45 days until the South Carolina Republican primary
• 297 days until the 2024 presidential election